A birthday party is usually a good barometer to gauge the life and interests of a child and her peers outside the ambit of home. The conversations range from the tyranny of one’s parents that does not allow them access to what certainly is the best video game on the planet to the new storybook that has been acquired which is so riveting that the Maths homework remains undone; the good fortune of the friend who has been given a cellphone of his very own, to the spectacular goal one scored overcoming formidable opponents only for the games teacher to declare it to be on the off-side.
Sometimes, it veers towards staid themes — studies, for instance — and the appeal or lack thereof of a particular subject, topic or teacher: “Ma’am said all conquerors left behind a trail of destruction. But that’s really not true. The Mughals were certainly the worst. My father told me about the number of temples they destroyed! The Hindu rulers never did this.”; “It’s not part of the syllabus but the periodic table is so interesting. I found a book at home, The Disappearing Spoon. I can get it for you if you’d like to read”; “You all laughed at me when I said India had a meridian of its own before the Greenwich Meridian. My sister’s book says so now.”
In all honesty, in recent days, it’s the latter strand of conversation that has had a sobering impact on the parental conscience. The value placed on prejudices, the ruptures in a revised and rationalised syllabus that create lacunae, and, most of all, the increasing frequency of changes that chip away at context are perhaps serving to raise a generation of young people with half-baked knowledge and fully functional myopia.
Since its establishment in 1961, the mandate of the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) has been to produce contemporary and comparable teaching aids, especially textbooks, that represent India’s diversity. While the four previous revisions it has undergone — in 1975, 1988, 2000 and 2005 — have had imprints of the day’s government, in the last decade, and especially since the pandemic, the spate of changes, ostensibly to create “positive citizens” as opposed to “violent and depressive citizens” have focused on omissions over commissions. This has been particularly true for Social Sciences, including History, Geography and Political Science, and General Science, where the ellipses relate to Mughal history, Gandhi’s assassination, Emergency, protest movements, the Naxalite movement, the demolition of the Babri Masjid, Periodic Table, evolutionary theory, how illnesses spread through viruses and bacteria, to name but a handful.
It is, of course, nobody’s contention that school textbooks remain static. Upgrades are an integral part of keeping up with changes in academia. But a decolonisation project that aims to lessen the burden on children cannot end up putting them on the back foot. The National Education Policy (NEP) 2020’s objective to link lived realities to textbooks is a good premise to nurture critical thinking. But that cannot be achieved by a paternalistic attitude that predetermines cause and effect and does not factor in the intelligence and resilience of students to interrogate complexities and draw their own conclusions.
In Germany, for instance, Nazi history forms a part of high-school curriculum, guiding students through a dark period to make informed judgements about politics and the past; the near absence of the history of the Empire in British schools continues to be contested and criticised. In India, erasing the Emergency or Gujarat 2002 will not make these blots of its past go away. Instead, open discussions on them will help young people recognise their own unconscious or inherited biases. Perhaps, it will help some among them recognise the folly of one-upmanship and majoritarianism early on; perhaps, they will confront it better than many adults. Certainly, that would make for a prettier picture of India Shining than a generation preening with determined pride at the imagination of a past that might have been over one that certainly was.
Even if one were to put away moral considerations and look at it from a purely academic perspective, half-knowledge is dangerous preparation for the very competitive realm of higher education. In particular, when it comes to the sciences, always aspirational for India’s middle class, it is unhelpful to remain divorced from standardised global discourses on it. It is a prescription for anguish and an inevitably frustrating struggle to play catch up.
A pre-pandemic edition of NCERT’s Our Pasts I, has a prefatory note on why history matters: “When we try and enter another world, we have to learn how to do this — to understand people whose lives were different. As we do this, we open up our minds and break out of our small present-day worlds. We begin to see how other people may think and act…”
This understanding of the larger world and our place in it is awareness and awakening, empowerment and education. It is what prepares us for all that is to come — politics, society, culture, life. It should set the children free, not hold them back.
paromita.chakrabarti@expressindia.com
